


Five Formidable Ladies

by OtherCat



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Character Study, Other, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-12-12
Updated: 2004-12-12
Packaged: 2017-10-07 15:22:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/66433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OtherCat/pseuds/OtherCat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five aspects of a former god-king. Wes/Illyria implied.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Formidable Ladies

**Lamashtu**

Something was eating her from the inside out.

She thought she could feel it spreading inside her like a cancer. Disease or parasite, metamorphosis (she wasn't quite sure how to define it yet, if she'd get a chance to define it) cold and alien thoughts infiltrating her brain. Fred thought of wasps stinging tarantulas so that they could lay their eggs. Baby cuckoos pushing hatchlings out of their nest. She doesn't tell these things to Wesley, doesn't want to hurt him, not now, when everything was going so well.

She can feel herself dying, by inches as she fights a losing battle with something that can't be fought, that she has no weapon to fight. She wonders if this is what someone who'd been turned into a vampire might feel, if the process happened while they were still conscious--this slow and horrible transformation, this feeling of being devoured.

She spends endless seconds theorizing, trying to distract herself by approaching the problem analytically, and doesn't let herself think of anything else, not even the terrible, whispering suspicion that this time, Angel won't be able to save her.

**Hel**

This body is crippled. She loathes it's fragility, for all that her transformed flesh is strong. Difficult to bruise, hard to break. She is unbelievably strong, but compared to what she once was, she is weak, limited, sickly. She had escaped confinement, and now she is imprisoned anew. For all her hardness, she is still too frail, the most delicate of crystal to contain the seething forces within.

She doesn't understand how her power could have turned in her hand, how strength could have become a weakness, how her power could become her bane. Death, (and the destruction of the alien, unwelcome hive of vermin) would have been a relief, perhaps, but she is not permitted even that. No, she must survive, surrounded by hybrids, vermin, and the nearly (dearly) mad, and wonder if she might be a little mad herself to so remain.

She contemplates (hates) the irony of her survival, still as stone, willing herself blind and deaf, struggling to touch what she can no longer hold.

**Isis **

For timeless minutes, Illyria studied Wesley. A cast off shell empty of all essence--all soul. Random electromagnetic pulses of not-memory flickered. She thought of electrical impulses. Electrical impulses were easier to understand, than the nature of souls. Souls were bright, elusive things, like birds--she had felt Wesley's slip through her fingers and fly away (and she, the god-king who had destroyed countless souls at the height of her power felt a terrible pain at the loss.)

She thought of hybrids and their method of propagation.

What flowed in her veins was not blood, however, and Wesley was already dead. She however, was not a vampire. She knelt by the body, and began to cut.

**Psyche **

She wondered at the sound of wings--or perhaps that was the sound of her heart, thundering in her ears. Her thoughts were as dim and faded as the room where she lay broken. Confusing, because in her long life, she'd never experienced anything like this foggy disconnection of thought and sensory data before. She knew that it would be very dangerous to sleep now, and yet it seemed to take a tremendous amount of will to keep her eyes from fluttering closed.

She cursed this frail shell she inhabited. Cursed Time itself, for destroying her kingdom (as Time destroyed all things.) Cursed Angel for unmaking her power. Cursed the Wolf, Ram and Hart and all their works (Hamilton in specific and particular.)She was wishing a plague of boils and lice upon all of Angel's kingdom when the blond hybrid she'd considered making her pet and Wesley arrived.

She wondered if the lightness she felt at Wesley's concerned look was from dizziness at being helped to her feet, or something else.

**The Morrigan **

She fought, a whirlwind, mind blank of anything except the kill and a grief more bottomless than the Well. Wesley. Who had asked her to lie to him--never knowing that half of what she'd spoke was truth. Wesley, who had spoken truths to her, and in his growing madness and (bottomless) pain had been a better guide and priest than Knox had been in all his abject adoration.

She was dimly aware that others had joined the fight. Mortals. Weapons (guns) blazing. Two huge machines (helicopters), blades chopping the air shone vivid, blinding light that refracted in the pouring rain-- and Spike pulled her away from the demon she was eviscerating. "Bloody stupid bint! Come on!" and caught her arm.

Spike did not know how close he came to dying at that moment. Or he knew, and didn't care. He glared at her, defiant, and she stared. The grief mazed, cracked, shattered, though she couldn't say why. She crumpled, weeping against the hybrid's chest.


End file.
